I need some help figuring out a way to accomplish my particular needs for mail organization.
Recently I’ve wanted to adjust my mail workflow to get things out of my Inbox more efficiently. So, I am now finally acting on everything that comes into my Inbox by deleting, archiving, or otherwise moving mail. Now, the problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to create a second top-level mailbox that syncs across all devices. So, I created a new Mailbox on my desktop for the time being, since I do most of my serious email on my Mac. However, I would like to process them on iOS as well. However, since that folder doesn’t sync, there is a problem. I have multiple email accounts across multiple email services and I don’t have the option to simplify that part of the workflow. Can anyone suggest a way to solve this problem either in Mail itself, through a 3rd Party App, or in some other way? Effectively I need to have a custom top-level mailbox that syncs across devices. Oh, also, flags don’t work because if an email is archived but flagged it doesn’t show up on iOS. Is there a solution to this problem?
I use the flag feature all the time for this reason, and archived email does show up.
This behaviour changed with iOS 13 I believe (or a bit earlier)
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I also use flags for this many times a day. It works 100% of the time when I flag something on Mac and the go to iOS, and vice versa, regardless of whether it’s archived. In fact, all my flagged items are archived (because I keep an inbox zero) and they still show up.
I’d try following some troubleshooting steps because it is possible to get this working.
This is good to know. But as far as I can tell, not all of my flagged items (which are archived) sync over to iOS only 8 of the 35 flagged + archived are available in the flagged folder on iOS.
That is strange, ever since the change (I believe it was sometime last year) it’s been rock solid for me.
Are you sure the mails are in the archive? Some mail servers require the archive folder to be specified in macOS, and this could impact them showing up on iOS?
I believe so. I’ll double check. I’m starting to wonder if I just need to reset the flag.
Okay, I’ve tooled around with this a little including resetting the flags and they are still not showing up in iOS. Does anyone have some suggestions that I might employ in my set up. I have Exchange, Google, and iCloud accounts that I manage on my devices.
Ah… Is there a difference in the flags for each account?
I’d expect the icloud ones to show up, and the gmail ones as well.
Exchange might have different behaviour
Not that I can tell. I have flagged emails from all types and none sync over to iOS.
I believe that after fiddling around with it I may have got things working right. I noticed that in iOS the flagged emails that I couldn’t see were also not visible when I searched the Archive Folder or even in All Mailboxes. So, I placed them all back in their respective Inboxes and then archived them on my iPhone after they synced there. After that I was able to see them. I’ve tested a few other new emails by flagging and archiving on my Mac now and they are showing up in iOS.
Troubleshooting sure is difficult when everything is in a black box.
good to hear it’s working now 
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